Beijing Tech Hive : A Weekend To Look Forward

Mar 28, 2013
|In Posts
|By Kang Zhou

The creation of Baidu, Taobao and Tencent has not only made people’s daily life more convenient, but also exerted great influence on the young generation. Whether you like it or not, you cannot deny that startup has become one of the hottest topics nowadays. With the growing passion for entrepreneurship, there are regular startup events held in Beijing to allow young generation with ideas and dreams to interact with angel investors and venture capitalists.

The past weekend witnessed the Beijing Tech Hive held in Microsoft building located in northwest Beijing area, which recruited a group of 40 highly motivated IT developers, graphic designers and business managers to work together closely, and build a prototype of product or service within 54 hours.

On Friday night, 30 participants pitched the initial ideas respectively and 5 ideas were selected. During the whole weekend, candidates were divided into 5 teams to develop a prototype to make their business idea come true. On Sunday evening, each team made a final presentation to a panelist of mentors including Rui Ma of 500 Startups, Qiang Shen of Microsoft Accelerator Windows Azure, Alan Chen of Shanda Capital. The ideas included:

Edify : An online education platform focus on AP course
Shi-Wo Shuo : An O2O education platform for kids to learn language and culture
Culture Agents : A remote speech therapy platform helping the children after the cleft lip and palate surgery
Upinion : An opinion and rating feature for social networking
Wu Wei Bu Zhi : A new approach on weibo to allow the ordinary user’s voice and opinion to be heard

 

The first prize went to Edify. The winning team worked on an online education platform allowing K-12 teachers to create and share content, and students to learn and digest content at their own pace. It helps to cut off part of teachers’ unnecessary workload, and students to study in a more efficient and effective manner.

Beijing Tech Hive, a 54 hours hackathon-style startup event, helps participants not only find team members, get feedback from mentors and build up the companies, but also work with people from different sectors with diversified cultural background. The event is organized by Red Pagoda Resources, a recruiting business that helps VC-backed startups in China find exceptional talent, and supported by Singtel Innov8. Joseph Chen, the CEO of Edify, said one of the highlights to attend Beijing Tech Hive is to meet so many friends and enjoy an exciting startup weekend.